Can one easily tell one design from another? In all cases? In some cases?
The answer is: it depends.
It depends on what designs and time period of each.
The latest D/S designs are actually superior to the older ladder chips. Some new custom ladder designs are better than most D/S designs.
Older ladder designs are very musical, but lack precision, so they are not as resolving in the high-frequencies as modern D/S designs.
Some new custom ladder designs have more precision, so they are as good as many modern D/S designs.
Both types of designs benefit from elimination or optimization of digital filtering.
The devil is in the details though. All of them have the sonic signature created by their implementation, power subsystem and digital filtering. Because of these, one cannot make broad conclusions that one is better than the other. It is easy to create a D/A or ladder design that is mediocre. It is more difficult to make either stellar or world-class.
Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Steve Williams Site Founder | Site Owner | Administrator | Ron Resnick Site Co-Owner | Administrator | Julian (The Fixer) Website Build | Marketing Managersing |